Sally Pipes: "ACA's Patient Choice Boondoggle Not Aging Well"

The following is an excerpt from an article by Sally Pipes, Founder & Chair of the Benjamin Rush Institute, published in Newsmax. Click here to read the full article in your browser.

In an interview prior to the recent official opening of his presidential library, former President Barack Obama was asked to name his greatest accomplishment.

The first thing that came to mind was the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

As he put it, “For all the resistance from our political opposition, the Affordable Care Act has now helped 50, 60 million people, and continues to help people even though the current Congress has tried to weaken it and taken away some of the subsidies that were really helping a lot of working people.”

The data tell a different story.

On a number of metrics — from the cost of coverage to the availability of high-quality care to the sustainability of public safety-net programs — our nation’s healthcare system is in worse shape than it was before Obamacare became law.

Let’s start with cost. Fewer than half of Americans can consistently afford access to quality care, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Obama seems to blame these affordability problems on the expiration of enhanced premium subsidies earlier this year.

That’s an odd argument, given that those subsidies were not part of Obamacare. They were a temporary pandemic-era addition enacted more than a decade after the law’s passage.

The fact is, premiums were soaring long before those subsidies appeared. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, average monthly premiums in states using the Healthcare.gov exchange more than doubled from $232 in 2013 to $476 in 2017. Last year, they hit $619 a month.

The cause can be found in Obamacare’s design.

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